


Ghastly Echoes Falling

by InadaOnFire



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Edward at Oxford!, Edward/nature, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-11
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-07 04:17:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3160868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InadaOnFire/pseuds/InadaOnFire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just another day from Edward Courtenay's Oxford years; though it's more special than he's letting on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghastly Echoes Falling

**Author's Note:**

> For Tiesandtea - Happy Birthday!

It had been a long day, Edward thought, tipping his head back to stare at the impressive ceiling curving above him.  This morning’s tutorial and all subsequent events felt distant, like it had all happened weeks before and he had been lost in the library ever since.  Strange perceptions of time notwithstanding, the last hour had certainly cut him off from his earlier productivity.  The book he had been making steady progress through that afternoon lay before him, unread since the last time he had heard the distant and perhaps wholly imaginary—heard purely out of expectation—ringing of bells.

The library was almost empty.A few industrious students were scattered here and there, but because the initial shine of the first few weeks of term had worn off, most students, already tired of the softly lit rooms and the dry smell of books, had elected the day to be a summer’s one.It was an absurdly late one, but the weather had conspired with the students since that morning, and most of them had scattered to the sunniest spots on campus like children after church.

Noticing that he had been absently dragging his thumbnail against the the pages of the book—a steady _zip zip_ filling the air—Edward closed the book and stilled his hands.Apprehensively he glanced over at the other students in this corner of the library, but they were so absorbed in their books and their own heads that, Edward thought, a train could speed through the room and not one of them would blink.Edward grinned, only just holding back a laugh.Belatedly, one of them shot him an exasperated look before returning to the large green book she had been bent over all afternoon.

He got up and stood idly for a moment, not quite sure of his decision to leave.He could stay a while longer, but there really was no hope for anymore studying.Edward tucked both book and jacket under his arm and slipped away through the hush of the library.

Outside, the late afternoon sun was still obstinately jolly.After so long in the library, where even the brightest lamp’s light was soaked up by the dark wood of the bookshelves, it was dazzling and difficult to see in without squinting.Edward held up his jacket to shield his eyes as he hurried down the steps and turned to walk along the road.

The flush of auburn that had crept into the trees weeks before was now scattered all over, crunching underfoot.Edward passed a few students as he walked.Stepping from the slowly shifting shadows of the pale brick buildings, they were cast in autumn’s warm light, which transformed them from the scruffy students that usually hurried along the narrow, well worn side walks into the sharp edged and softly colored subjects of a painting.

Edward wasn’t paying much attention to where he was going, and it wasn’t until he had crossed Broad St. that he realized he had been walking away from Christ Church.Edward turned on the ball of his foot to immediately cross back but dropped back down with a curse.A group of cyclists clattered their way down the street, filling the air with the whirring of gears.After the last bike had turned and disappeared from sight, Edward dashed across. 

On the other side, he gazed up at the philosophers, who, their eyes bulbous with wild knowledge, stared back down at him from their high perches circling the theatre.They were beheaded sentinels, each eye slightly off center so that, unnervingly, there was always one pair of eyes fixed on him as he walked past and then farther and farther away.

The sun finally started to set when he reached the edge of Christ Church meadow.A few students ran past him as he walked down the wide dirt path that lead to the river.The dirt and leaves crunched beneath his feet, and he picked up his pace, bouncing a little with each step.Though he had been avoiding it all day, he was glad, now, to abandon his studies and enjoy the meadow.Over the summer holidays and before he had come up to Oxford, he had spent most days roaming the land around his family’s house. 

Down by the grassy shore of the Isis, in a sunny spot far from even the nearest group of laughing students, Edward set his jacket and book a safe distance from the water and sat down to watch the rowers. 

When the sun was low and shining through the leafless trees, the rowers passed by him for what was probably the last time.The stroke of the oars was smooth and controlled.There was something bird-like about the boat as it glided over the water.The many oars disappeared into one another as they moved in perfect synchrony, and the eight young men became a single creature slipping away on wide wings. _My heart in hiding stirred for a bird, —the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!_ The lines leapt to his mind, and for the first time he really saw the it, the perfection of it all: the skater’s heel that was the wheeling kestrel that was the racing rowers and so on right down to the last whirling leaf alighting upon the water. 

He lay back, arms outstretched, and let the memorized lines trickle away with the breeze.He lay there for a long time, waiting until he couldn’t see the last of the sun’s orange glow from behind his closed eyelids.

The previously warm grass was now drenched in shadow and cold through his shirt.Sitting up and pulling his knees to his chest, Edward looked out over the river, dark and rippling.He thought about getting up and wading into the river.Not far, just up to the knee to stand in the gently moving water.He felt an urgency to his thoughts—pushing him to get up, get up!—but like so many things the effort seemed enormous, so he continued to sit, getting up in his mind over and over but never moving.

Eventually he rolled up his trousers and took of his shoes. 

Slowly he got to his feet and waded into the cold river.

The first step was absolutely frigid, and he gasped as the silt of the river bed squeezed through his toes and shifted beneath his feet, plunging him in up to the knee.He jumped from one foot to the other, laughing through the chattering of his teeth.

He swung his legs loosely through the water, which dragged at him, slowing him down and splashing his trousers.He walked through the shallows until his things piled on the shore were a shadow, a darker lump in the night.The only light came from the far away lamps and the windows of the colleges.

 

* * *

 

Back at his college, Edward hurried up the last few steps to his room and was already reaching for his door, key in hand, when he noticed the piece of paper, folded over multiple times into a thin strip, that was secured to his door handle.He pulled at the twine, twisting the paper, but the knot was irksomely small and tight.

Sighing, he unlocked his door and pushed into his room.  He had left the window open that morning, and the room was frigid.  He hardly noticed, though.  There was only one person this note could be from.He returned a moment later with a penknife from his desk and cut the twine.It fell to the floor in a curl, which he pushed under his bed with a toe to go live with dust and pencil shavings.The note was a crumpled mess at the center where it had been tied to the handle, but he flattened it out on his desk, sighing again when he saw that it was, indeed, from Jack.

His brother had scrawled in large letters over the entire page _Happy Birthday, big brother. Enjoy that while it lasts._

Edward sat down in his desk chair and let the paper fall from his fingers, remembering the absurd, simpering story that their Nanny had sometimes told them about Jack’s early birth.She had told them that in heaven Jack had been so eager to meet his wonderful big brother that he hadn’t waited for the proper time to be born.He pictured her kind face assuring them that they were just the luckiest boys in the world to have each other, like special twins.

Even as a child, Edward had found the story ridiculous and unbelievable, and he would often pester their Nanny to tell him how she knew these things.She would always laugh and pat his cheek, and he would always stomp off in the kind of petulant anger that children excel at.He didn’t think Jack had thought very highly of their Nanny’s story either.Nevertheless, some part of Jack had liked the idea that for them there was no distinction between older and younger brother, and it had started the tradition on Edward’s birthday that Jack would remind him, teasingly, that although he may be older now, for a couple months in the late summer they were the same age.They were the same; it was Jack’s obsession.It became Edward’s obsession, too. 

As a child, Jack had been ill, and despite all their parent’s talk of “growing out of it” and all the visits to this doctor or that doctor, Jack grew up to be an ailing young man.On one of the days that Jack was too ill to leave his bed, Edward had stood in the doorway to his brother’s room and stared at Jack’s eerily similar face, sickly and unmoving on the pillows.They were the same.That day, Edward had vowed never to be that helpless.

But all the vows couldn’t change the fact that Jack lying there had already made Edward feel helpless and scared.

Edward had run from that feeling, had scampered outside where his brother could no longer follow.If they were both destined to die young—and this had somehow become an inescapable, though dramatic, certainty to Edward— at least he could die outside.He had still felt Jack’s sorrowful eyes staring at him through the window everyday, so he had roamed farther and farther from the house.

His brother was no longer a friend but a sentinel as unnerving and unmoving as the stone philosophers.  

A few years later, when avoidance had completely soured their relationship, Jack figured out how to get back at Edward: on good days he would sit in their father’s study, asking hime about the farms and how it was all run while Edward would sit in fields and under moldy old trees boiling with jealousy and silencing pride.

Sometimes Edward would come home and peek through the door into their father’s study to see them talking seriously.For a moment he would catch Jack’s eye and consider joining them, but then Jack would turn away pointedly.Edward, then, would always continue past, climb the stairs to his room, and curl up in his bed.The heaviness in every limb and the regret that pierced straight through his heart pinned him there for hours at a time.Jack means to replace him, Edward would think as he lay there, and in all likelihood he will because Edward will stay here in bed, helpless against the sadness and apathy of his own mind. 

Avoiding Jack hadn’t saved him from anything. 

It was years later now, both at university, and neither dead.Staring at the message, Edward felt a chill prickle through his body, and the heaviness of his birthday, of being another year older and another year further from his brother, was as crushing as his regret. 

He folded the paper up and put it under a stack of books on his desk, out of sight but not thrown out.He added a few more books on top for good measure.There was some satisfaction in the fact that his brother had not forgotten him completely, and he would hold onto that.He hadn’t seen his brother since their mother had given them both a kiss and they had boarded the train for university.He had not even caught a glimpse of him on the Oxford platform, and only through the letters from his mother did he know that Jack had even arrived and was attending his tutorials.

Through the open window he heard a commotion, someone yelling “carpe vinum,” in the courtyard below the window.Edward laughed.  The sound was jarring.He was barely sure why he was laughing as he climbed onto his desk to lean out the window, but there wasn’t enough light to see by and whoever had been yelling about wine was gone.  

Edward stayed halfway out the window, enjoying the thrill that such a precipitous position gave him.  

But the moment didn’t last long.He heard the sound of many feet on the stairs, and then muffled swearing and the clattering of a window latch came from a few rooms to the left of his.

The window popped open, and a young man followed.“Courtenay! Come over! I--” Avery, excitable as ever, gasped for breath, “I _know_ today’s your birthday. Can’t get out of this one!”

Edward smiled tightly and gripped the windowsill, the metal of which was icy cold and dug into his palm painfully.Avery was still yammering on, mostly to himself, about wine and whether or not he had proper food or just biscuits like it made any difference to Edward.He wasn’t keen on Avery.He made Edward uncomfortable—and seemed to take great pleasure in doing so—and his refusal to take his tutorials seriously was annoying.He knew for a fact that Avery did most of his assignments about an hour before their tutorial started.He had found him on multiple occasions crammed in a corner near their tutor’s office scribbling feverishly and clearly pleased with himself. 

“I don’t—,” he started to say, but Avery had already disappeared.

He quickly ducked back into his room, narrowly avoided hitting his head, and knocked a stack of books to the floor with his foot.He could see his brother’s note again.Its presence was no longer satisfying.He slid of his desk, stumbling a little on cramped legs.It was his birthday, and his brother wouldn’t even wish him happy birthday without the ugly reminder of their estrangement.And now he would spend the night either alone or with Avery hovering around, both of which were pathetic.

A shiver prickled along his spine again; he felt unusually lonely.  

Ignoring the pile of books on the floor, he unfolded the note again and ripped it into strips, and then into even smaller pieces so that the words could no longer be read, before tossing the handful of paper out the window.Some of the pieces fluttered back at him, and he spent a few minutes angrily grabbing them off his desk and flicking them out of the window again. 

 

* * *

  

Somehow, despite his reluctance to spend any amount of time with Avery and, judging from the amount of feet he had heard on the stairs, his crowd of friends, Edward soon found himself seated in an armchair in the corner of Avery’s brightly lit rooms, holding a glass of wine close to his chin and trying to look as unapproachable as possible.  

Watching the revelry unfold over the rim of his glass, he wondered which of these students had stolen the wine and shouted about it in the courtyard.He hoped it wasn’t Avery.That might really ruin his night because the wine thief had made him laugh, and he had spent most of his Avery related time at Oxford refusing to laugh at his antics.Someone sat down on the arm of the chair next to him, but Edward ignored whoever it was and, grimacing, took a drink of wine.

“Wine that bad?”

Edward jumped a little as he swallowed the ill-timed swig of wine.The young man perched next to him gestured to Edward with a half full bottle. In the other hand he held a glass, its contents already down to the dregs.

“No, it’s good,” Edward’s response sounded more like a question and his mouth was uncomfortably tacky with the sweet alcohol.Maybe he didn’t like wine.

“You looked offended by it,” the young man said.

“Oh—no,” Edward floundered for a moment, “I was thinking of something else.It’s, um, good.”Repeating himself made him inwardly cringe, but he wasn’t about to admit to his surprise companion that the wine made his mouth feel gross and that he was resisting the urge to cough.

“Oh, wonderful.It’s nice to know that my very near _bodily_ sacrifice to get this wine wasn’t a complete waste,” he said, probably exaggerating.The wine in the bottle sloshed as he waved it at the room and its loud occupants.“They just drink it away like it fell from he sky.”  

“Are you the one who ‘seized’ it?” Edward asked, nodding towards the window and the courtyard beyond from which he had apparently heard this young man shouting.

“Yes, it was I who _liberated_ it,” he laughed, though there wasn’t anything obviously funny about what he had said.He leaned forward to tap his glass against Edward’s and said “Patrick Crawley, you?”

“Edward Courtenay,” he said, not entirely sure if he wanted to be this committed to talking to Crawley.He must be a friend of Avery’s. 

“Are you a friend of Avery’s?” Edward asked. 

Crawley laughed, “No, no, I wouldn’t say friend.The few times I’ve met him—I, well, I can’t stand him, really.”

“Good,” Edward wanted to kick himself.Was that the only word he could think of tonight?“I was about to use my mother’s technique of politely getting out of a conversation if you had been,” he admitted.

"Your mother’s technique?I get the impression you don’t often think to use it.Would you have left me a calling card?”Crawley giggled.“And what’s yours?”

“My way of getting away from people?Oh, generally I just walk away.”

“Hence your mother’s advice for a polite exit.”

“But you seemed alright enough, so I thought I would do the kinder of the two,” Edward said, shrugging.  

Crawley laughed again and almost dropped his glass.Luckily it was almost empty, but Edward still eyed the single drop of red that slid lazily down the side of the glass with alarm.

“So glad I get special treatment.Though now that I know, I think I would have preferred you to just walk away.If I had truly been that awful to be around,” Crawley said, shuddering dramatically. 

“Why are you here if you aren’t friends with Avery?And why the wine?”Edward asked, watching Crawley wipe the drop of wine away before it encountered the cloth of the armchair.

“The truth is, I was almost caught getting this,” Crawley waved the bottle, “but Avery and his friends happened by and were a good distraction.Got the history professor I was avoiding to go down a different hall, away from the cellar.But then in exchange, they wanted me to get them more wine because I’d only gotten two bottles—hadn’t been planning on company.Was going to save it for the term, you know.Anyway, Avery insisted that he come with me, and he really is the noisiest boy I’ve ever met.So we almost got caught again, but this time it was his fault,” Crawley finished a little defiantly.

“Not like you were being quiet about it,” Edward pointed out.He turned in his chair to face Crawley, who made a mock offended face at him.

“Yes, but that was after we’d gotten away.It’s very different,” Crawley said, swinging his legs back and forth and grinning.Edward thought Crawley should annoy him, but he didn’t, oddly.The usual itch to get away was not there.

Crawley was talking again, speech exact, almost clipped at the end, and accent carefully formed, as if he rather enjoyed the sound of his own voice.He would probably start reciting poetry if he kept drinking wine.Somehow this didn’t seem like such a bad thing. 

They talked for a while longer.Eventually Edward tried to surreptitiously put his still full glass of wine on the floor, but Crawley stopped him. 

“Give that to me,” he said, leaning back to set his own glass and the bottle on the bookshelf behind them.He took Edward’s glass.“It doesn’t like you much either.”

Edward snorted, “somehow I think I will survive that rejection.”

Just then the infamous Larry Grey swept in, talking loudly to his shorter, blonder friend.Unsurprisingly, trailing behind them both was Grey’s younger brother, Timothy, perhaps the least autonomous person Edward had ever met.At least Jack wasn’t like Timothy Grey.

“Oh god, let’s get out of here,” Crawley whispered, nodding at the new arrivals. 

“What, because of them?”

“Of course, and because I don’t want to have to avoid Timothy tonight.He gets funny when I do that.”

“Why are you avoiding him?”

“He wants to be a diplomat, and I have a place in the foreign office all set for after I graduate.I think someone told him to befriend me or something,” Crawley said, and then hurriedly drank the rest of what had been Edward’s wine.“Why?You don’t mind them?There’s no way you can stand them if Avery annoys you.”

“No, it's just—where are we supposed to go?”

“Anywhere,” and the next moment Crawley was halfway across the room and then out the door before the Grey brothers could see him.

“Thanks for waiting,” Edward grumbled, following him at a slower pace and stopping only to glare once more at the back of Avery’s head.

 

* * *

 

The didn’t end up going far.In fact, they only got a few feet down the hall before Crawley asked him which door was his and promptly collapsed in front of it.Edward sat down next to him, hugging his knees to his chest.

“Here’s alright.It’s getting late anyways,” Crawley said.After a moment of silence, “Sorry.Was there somewhere you wanted to go?”

“No.I should want to go somewhere because it’s my birthday,” Edward said, “but I don’t, so it’s fine.This is fine.”

Crawley turned to him sharply.His flabbergasted expression made Edward laugh.“Why didn’t you say earlier that it’s your birthday!”Crawley exclaimed, his mouth still gaping a bit.

“Didn’t come up,” Edward looked away, “and I was trying to forget it's my birthday.”

So Edward told Crawley about his brother’s note, and in turn Crawley quietly told him that on his last birthday he had received a letter from his cousin with a rather disheartening poem printed in it.“And she says she doesn’t want to see me anymore.” 

“I’m sorry,” Edward murmured.  

“Well, she has a good reason, I suppose.I may be a little bit engaged with her sister,” Crawley said quickly.

“You’re what?”

Crawley scrunched up his eyes tightly and hunched forward.“It’s not official or anything.But that’s the future . . . plan, unfortunately.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Edward said.

“I’ll figure it out.”

“What was the poem?”

Crawley mumbled a few lines of the poem, which Edward recognized.It was about the engagement of an eager boy and a sensible, though self-deprecating girl.Very appropriate, Edward thought.Edward rested the side of his head on his knees and ran a hand through his hair and was embarrassed when he caught a leaf between his fingers.It must have been there all night.He flicked it away. 

Crawley had stopped talking and was now picking sadly at his shoe laces, mouth a terrible frown, so Edward asked, “Browning?Do you like that sort of thing?”

“Obviously I don’t much like _this_ poem.I don’t know—I mean, I don’t know much about it all.It’s my cousin that has the mind for literature.Though that means I spend more time reading with her than anything else when I would visit,” Crawley added wistfully. 

“Is she here, at Oxford?Girls can do that now.Do what they have a mind for.”

“Girls, sure, but not Ladies, not yet.”

Edward nodded, “that’s—” What was there to say? 

“Unfortunate? Yes, it is.” Crawley stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankle.“But still, it’s harsh to reject me like that when neither of us can do anything about it, yet.The families have plans, but I’ve no intention of following through.She _must_ know that.” 

“I hope it works out for you, Crawley,” Edward said quietly.

“Thanks, and happy birthday.Many more and all that.Here,” he reached into his jacket, “I’ll light a cigarette, and you can blow out the match for a wish.”He got out the necessary things, lit his cigarette, and held the match out to Edward.“Make a wish, Courtenay.”

Edward hesitated.

“Quickly, before I burn my fingers off,” Crawley said, hand shaking as the flame ate its way up the match.

Edward blew the match out. Now the only glow came from Crawley’s cigarette as he breathed the smoke in and out.

Edward rested his forehead against the door jamb and thought of his own uncertain future, his future of running the estate’s farms.He was sure that he would be out on the farms as much as possible and not keeping order from behind an impersonal desk like his father.Those fields were already his in spirit.Once university was over, everything would be as it should.

_I will have the farms, it will be glorious, and I will be happy_ —that was the future he had wished for.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the first line of the poem "Christ Church, Oxford," by John Ruskin.  
> The poem that Edward thinks of by the river is "The Windhover," by Gerard Manley Hopkins. This poem, though written in 1877, was actually published in 1918 - but, shhhhh ;)  
> And finally, the poem that Edith Crawley sent to Patrick was "Sonnet 32," by Elizabeth B. Browning.


End file.
